Arabic tweet act: a weighted ensemble pre-trained transformer model for classifying Arabic speech acts on Twitter

Speech acts are a speaker’s actions when performing an utterance within a conversation, such as asking, recommending, or thanking, or making a suggestion. Understanding speech acts helps interpret the intended meaning and actions behind a speaker’s or writer’s words. This article proposes a Twitter dialectal Arabic speech act classification approach based on a transformer deep learning neural network. We proposed a BERT based weighted ensemble learning approach to integrate the advantages of various BERT models in dialectal Arabic speech acts classification. We compared the proposed model against several variants of Arabic BERT models and sequence-based models. We developed a dialectal Arabic tweet act dataset by annotating a subset of a large existing Arabic sentiment analysis dataset (ASAD) based on six speech act categories. We also evaluated the models on a previously developed Arabic Tweet Act dataset (ArSAS). To overcome the class imbalance issue commonly observed in speech act problems, a transformer-based data augmentation model was implemented to generate an equal proportion of speech act categories. The results show that the best BERT model is araBERTv2-Twitter models with a macro-averaged F1 score and an accuracy of 0.73 and 0.84, respectively. The performance improved using a BERT-based ensemble method with a 0.74 and 0.85 averaged F1 score and accuracy on our dataset, respectively.